


If You Were A Human, My Love

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Love, Blood, and Rhetoric [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Although some FEELINGS snuck in here amid the smut, Anyway:, Blood, Emotional Idiots In Love, If you're looking for plot please come back another day, M/M, Pretty much just vampire-flavored smut, So is a blood warning really necessary?, Vampire Hannibal Lecter, for her entire life as well as for the tagging failure, mild rope stuff, the authoress apologizes profoundly, tooootally forgot to tag for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:16:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Will knows perfectly well Hannibal can’t glamour him, which just makes it all the more alarming that he moves toward Hannibal without conscious thought.  If it’s not a compulsion, then it’s something else that draws them together like this, increasingly frequently.  Hunger, or lust, or something infinitely scarier.</i>
</p><p>Or: In which a shameless enabler (ahem, everybreathagift) sends me a "modern vampire Hannibal smut with a human Will that enjoys providing his bae with sustenance" prompt and, well, here we are.  Does what it says on the tin, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Were A Human, My Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everybreathagift](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybreathagift/gifts).



The loose end of rope swings from Will’s hand, brushing against his thigh; he leaves it there for now, as he checks the knot.  For comfort; for tension.  For the pleasant heft of it against skin that doesn’t pale or pink under the pressure as it should.

He pulls it a little tighter, just because he  _ can _ , and strives for a conversational tone.

“If you were human,” he muses, “I’d have to loosen this a bit.  Blood flow.”

“ _ If _ I were human,” Hannibal purrs, “this might hold me.”

“It’ll hold you just fine.”

It will, he knows. The rope could fray under a flick of Hannibal’s unnatural strength, but it won’t.  He’ll hold, preternaturally still, because Will wants him to.  

It was safety, at first, when he was less sure of this.  A rope threaded with silver, a simpler loop; an entirely different purpose. Enough to let Will break away from being consumed, if he needed to. The silver hurt Hannibal and they don’t use it anymore, now that Will is more sure.  Now the rope is Will’s game and his pleasure, rather than his protection, and it doesn’t hurt Hannibal unless he means it to.

Even so, he finds himself sliding a finger beneath the rope and asking, “Okay?”

“Fine.”  Hannibal’s amused, always damnably amused, by Will’s care in this.  Will ignores it.  Good habits learned with actual humans die hard, even when they’re not actually needed anymore, and there are worse things than taking a moment to talk and touch while he’s still clear-headed enough to do it.  He nuzzles gently against Hannibal’s cool, smooth skin, and moves on.

He winds a loop around Hannibal’s chest, pausing to splay his fingers there.  He holds long enough to feel the utter lack of a heartbeat against his palm.  “If you were human,” he says again, “I suppose we’d never have ended up here.  You’d have rubber-stamped me and sent me straight back to Jack.”

“I’d have rubber-stamped you and kept you for myself anyway,” Hannibal corrects, eyes heavy-lidded in the dim light.  “I’d have kept you for your mind alone.  But it would be a shame to have missed out on the rest of you.”

Will shivers and smiles at the tone of his voice. That really would have been a shame, for both of them. “I’d probably have turned you in the first time you tried to glamour me.”

“I’d have had to resort to something much more sordid.”  Hannibal sounds vaguely displeased at he thought.  “Drugs, I suppose. Hypnosis.”

“Maybe one of those would have actually  _ worked _ on me.”  He’s almost done, now.  Another twist of the rope.  A pause to consider a world where Hannibal’s glamours and his own peculiar mind hadn’t bounced off each other, unable to find purchase.  Where Hannibal had been able to thrall him properly, instead of this delicate balance they’ve found together, a shifting dance of power and trust and mutually satisfying hungers.

He doesn’t think he’d have liked that world much.  This is better.

He’d intended to bind Hannibal a bit more but decides abruptly that he’s done and twists the end of the rope carefully.  In a minute he’ll step back and admire and decide what’s next, but first he touches the pad of a thumb lightly to Hannibal’s lips to see them part for him.  “Teeth, please,” is more of a statement than a request, and Hannibal bares fangs to him.  Unruffled by his bonds; obedient only as long as he wants to be.

Will scrapes his thumb over the point of a fang, just enough to draw a thin beaded line of crimson,  and then steps back.  He licks absently at the welling blood himself, for the sheer pleasure of seeing Hannibal’s eyes snap and spark at him with the frustration of being denied the taste he’d been expecting.  

It would take so little for Hannibal to break from Will’s snare and take what he wants.   He could do it, and wants to, and won’t until Will says he can, and doesn’t  _ that _ just light up Will’s nervous system with a zing of excitement up his spine.

_ Holding a tiger by the tail _ is probably the right expression for what it is that passes between them when Hannibal allows this, but whoever came up with that expression didn’t know the half of it.  Couldn’t possibly have imagined that the tiger might  _ let  _ itself be held, might purr and curl and show its vulnerable underbelly, right up until it snaps and snarls and sinks in its teeth.  Couldn’t have imagined that there would be as much pleasure in letting the tiger loose as there had been in holding it.

The black rope cutting stripes across Hannibal’s sun-deprived skin  _ is _ rather tiger-like, at that.  Will bites at his lip as he studies his handiwork, mostly because it prevents him from saying or doing anything that he might regret later.  He watches, only that, as Hannibal stays just as Will wants him.

“Beautiful,” he finally allows himself to say.  “I’d draw you like this if I had your talent for it.”

Hannibal tips his chin up, proud and utterly unembarrassed to be displayed like this, for Will.  The tense frustration in the line of his muscles eases slightly and he says, “It’s less talent than long practice.  We didn’t have cameras to preserve our memories when I was young.”

Will shakes his head slightly.  Even knowing what Hannibal is - even feeding Hannibal from his own veins for weeks now - it’s still sometimes hard to comprehend just how old he must be.  

Rather than think about that - counting backwards, trying to comprehend the vast gulf of experience that separates them - he opts for action.  He tugs his shirt off and flings it somewhere in the general direction of the laundry hamper.  Watches Hannibal’s eyes narrow, considering his neck and torso; the mostly-healed puncture marks and the more prosaic bruises of hands and lips.  

Will’s a bit of a mess these days. It had taken precisely one snotty remark from Zeller, and the ensuing barrage of questions from Bev, for him to invest in turtlenecks.  Not that it’s helped any.  Bev just teases him about the turtlenecks, now.  At least she can’t see his thighs.  

He offers an awkward sort of half-shrug to Hannibal and an apologetic, “We don’t all have your creepy healing powers.”

“You’re lovelier now than the first day I tasted you,” Hannibal says, and it should sound ridiculous but somehow it doesn’t.  “I think you may be placing too much faith in my patience, however.  Come closer.”

Will knows perfectly well Hannibal can’t glamour him, which just makes it all the more alarming that he moves toward Hannibal without conscious thought.  If it’s not a compulsion, then it’s something else that draws them together like this, increasingly frequently.  Hunger, or lust, or something infinitely scarier. 

Whatever it is, he goes, arms around Hannibal’s neck, rocking up onto his toes and baring his throat to give Hannibal better access. He presses in close and warm, hard enough to feel the lines of the rope around Hannibal pressing into his own bare skin.  

“Just like this, for now,” is all the permission he needs to give. As soon as the words are out, Hannibal does something that seems like breathing in Will’s scent, for all that Will knows he doesn’t breathe.  He nestles his face into the warm skin of Will’s throat for a long moment, and then there’s the sting Will’s become intimately familiar with, as he sinks his teeth into one of the vanishingly few unmarked spots there.

It’s a hit of piercing cold at first, before pain or pleasure have a chance to catch up. _  My carotid _ , Will thinks, and the thought brings with it a memory of a dazed and aching night spent in Will’s bed in Wolf Trap, with Hannibal tracing and naming his veins until Will could almost feel each separate current of blood running beneath his skin.

He feels one of those currents now: the throb and pull of his life force spilling hot into Hannibal’s mouth.  His pulse races and the cold fades, replaced by heat he can feel all the way down to his toes.  He can’t find a thing to say except Hannibal’s name, perched sweetly on his lips every time he parts them to gasp for breath. 

It feels like it goes on forever, like each tidal pull of blood from his throat takes minutes or hours. It can’t be all that long, or all that much blood, since he’s still mostly steady on his feet, but it feels like the slowest, sweetest torture ever devised.

It’s sloppy, with Hannibal bound and unable to position Will exactly as he’d like; he sucks and licks at Will’s neck but a neglected rivulet of crimson still makes its way down his throat and collarbone.  Even if Will couldn’t feel it smearing wetly between their chests, he’d smell it, copper and salt in the air.  It’s really fucking problematic that he’s starting to develop  a Pavlovian response to that smell; it’s going to make his life hell at crime scenes.  But he can’t care at this instant, not with the groan Hannibal lets loose when he prises his mouth from Will’s neck.

“Will,” he offers, in what’s probably intended to be a sweet plea even though it comes out gravelly and harsh, “I believe we would both benefit from returning the use of my hands to me, at this point in the evening.”

It’s probably true.  There’s been a low steady thrum of arousal under Will’s skin since he tied the first knot, but it was secondary to other considerations, and it’s muscling its way to the front of Will’s attention now.  It turns out to be a heady thing, supplying from his own body the one thing Hannibal craves most, feeling himself the perfect still center around which Hannibal’s world revolves in these moments.

Yes, giving Hannibal his hands back seems like a good idea right now.  

Will eases back down from his toes to stand flat-footed.  Hannibal’s lips are red; his chin smeared with it from the messy feeding. His eyes are fathomless, dark and hungry.  Hannibal hides what he is so well from so much of the world that Will still isn’t entirely used to seeing him like this.  He’s not sure he ever will be, or that he wants to be.  The shock of it is thrilling every time - how he undoes Hannibal without even trying.

He ducks his head away from the look in Hannibal’s eyes and sets to undoing his ropework with hands that only tremble slightly when he asks, “How do I taste?”

“Marvelous.”  The word sounds indecent in Hannibal’s mouth, thick with blood and lust. 

Will keeps his eyes determinedly on the rope he’s unwinding, rubbing Hannibal’s skin lightly as he goes even though there’s no need to encourage bloodflow.  He just likes watching Hannibal’s muscles tense and relax under his hand.  “Almost done. What did you have in mind for your hands, once they’re free?”

He feels a violent surge of heat to his cheeks as soon as the words are out.  This is new, too - talking, before doing.  But Hannibal, who spends all day listening to people talk and who should by all rights want silence or wordless sighs, nonetheless wants Will’s voice.  Will’s never had anyone as greedy for every scrap of him as Hannibal is, and it makes him want to give more, to feed Hannibal’s hungers every way he can.

“There are a variety of tempting options,” Hannibal starts, like he’s planning a goddamn menu or choosing a suit.  “I thought I’d finish undressing you, for a start. Clean up the mess you’ve made of yourself.  And then we’ll see.  I’m still terribly thirsty.”   One of his hands comes free and it finds its way immediately to Will’s face, stroking lightly over his cheek.  “Will you let me have you?”  

He could ask for clarification but it doesn’t matter. Whatever Hannibal means, whatever way he intends to have Will, they both know what the answer is.  He breathes his  _ yes _ against the skin of Hannibal’s shoulder, imagining that it feels just a little warmer now that Hannibal’s had some of Will’s blood.  He kisses the space his breath just warmed and finishes undoing the last bit of rope to let it fall to the floor, forgotten.

He holds Hannibal’s wrist for a moment, resisting the urge to have him wiggle fingers or flex his wrist, and shakes his head with a wry smile.  “I just keep thinking about the girl who taught me this stuff.  She ground it into me so hard, how careful you have to be.  Hard habits to break.”

Hannibal flexes his fingers in Will’s grip, perhaps to soothe those ingrained impulses. “I promise you, Will, there is very little you could do to hurt me physically.  But I appreciate the impulse.”  He raises their joined hands to his mouth and sniffs at Will’s pulse, but doesn’t bite.  “On the bed, please.”  

Will goes, wishing vaguely that there were any sort of way to clamber onto Hannibal’s small-country-sized bed with a modicum of grace or seductiveness.  He forgets the thought when the mattress dips with the weight of Hannibal settling next to him, and he’s moving before he can even think about it, craving skin contact like he imagines Hannibal craves blood.   Like he’s incomplete without it, ravenous in a way that surpasses mere hunger.

Things get a little disjointed, then.  Will’s kissing Hannibal avidly, and Hannibal’s licking the smeared blood from Will’s chest and suckling gently at the wound on his neck, and what little remains of their clothes go flying, and Will’s furiously hard and pressing up against Hannibal’s hip, and Hannibal’s hands are just  _ everywhere _ , and when he presses Will onto his back Will catches a glimpse of them in Hannibal’s stupid fucking bedroom mirror and thinks wildly  _ so that thing about the reflections is a myth, thank god, I really don’t want to watch myself get sucked dry by absolutely nothing  _ and these things can’t possibly all be happening at once. There are probably some abilities Hannibal has that he hasn’t shown Will yet, but they likely don’t include extra hands or tongues.  But it feels like it’s all of a piece, a whirlwind of sensations he can’t seem to separate or organize.

Will’s losing the plot a little, maybe, between the blood loss and the disbelief that he’s wanted like this, and allowed to want in return.  Somehow that’s still the least believable part of this thing that he and Hannibal have been doing for weeks now.

When events re-form themselves into something resembling order and sense, he’s still on his back, but Hannibal’s left off at his neck and is working his way down Will’s torso, slowly.   _ Like he’s got all night _ , Will thinks, which he  _ does _ , because Will’s dating-fucking-feeding a vampire so all night is probably the perfect feeding schedule.  The thought’s almost enough to make him laugh and ruin the mood entirely.  He’s only prevented from it by Hannibal doing something terribly clever and cruel with his hand, stroking down the length of Will’s side with soft fingertips and sharp nails, so that Will’s laugh dies and is reborn as a soft keening instead.

“Come on,” he hears himself say, goading Hannibal on.  “ _ Bite me _ .  Some of us don’t have all the time in the world.”

That gets him a murmured “Impatient boy,” and Will writhes and burns with the hot embarrassment of it.  He would never let anyone else get away with calling him “boy”, but at Hannibal’s age that must be what Will seems, and he doesn’t entirely hate it.  Not enough to do or say anything in complaint that might distract Hannibal from his leisurely trip down Will’s body

Not so leisurely now, actually.  Hannibal’s taken the hint and moved on to nose at the crease of Will’s thigh, with a pleased little noise that sends most of the remaining blood in Will’s body hurtling toward his groin at lightspeed. 

“I believe I would find you worth savoring slowly even if I weren’t what I am,” he says in a musing, idly curious tone of voice.  He traces a finger down, along the line of Will’s thigh ( _ the femoral artery,  _ he’d said on that endless night in Wolf Trap,  _ lies close to the skin just here, and there’s often a musky quality that’s as much smell as taste... _ )  “But, if you insist…”

And then he’s a blur, moving too fast for Will to quite follow.  He feels the pain before he realizes Hannibal’s bitten him again, deep and sore enough that it must be near one of the places on Will’s thigh that’s already mottled and tender with bruises and bites.  He feels more than hears the sound he makes in instinctive response - more or less a howl, pain and surprise at once, and his whole body tries to jerk but Hannibal’s got him thoroughly pinned down.

“ _ Fuck!” _ is about all the eloquence Will can muster, panting through the initial spike of pain and then slowly sinking into the spreading warmth that follows it.  He forces himself to start to relax into it, and then finds he doesn’t have to force it. Hannibal takes and takes what Will’s there to give willingly, and in the space left behind, lassitude creeps through him. His limbs start to feel heavy, his vision blurry around the edges, his heartbeat thunders in his ears.  He could just do this - lie right here and let Hannibal have him - for as long as it would take to empty himself entirely.

It’s probably a predatory mechanism of some sort.  Something in Hannibal’s fangs or saliva that combines with the blood loss to make Will like this, heavy and yielding and slow.  He keeps meaning to ask at a less fraught time but he never gets around to it; he’s been more interested in the poetry of Hannibal’s body than its mechanics.  He certainly can’t ask now - can barely make his lips move to form words at all beyond sighs and an occasional hitching little plea of a moan.

It seems entirely unfair that the languor induced by a vampire’s bite doesn’t go so far as to tamp down the arousal too, but Will’s still hard, aching to be touched - he just can’t seem to move his arm enough to do it himself.  Maybe it doesn’t generally matter to vampires if their prey die with an untended hard-on.  Maybe their prey don’t usually respond quite the way Will does.  Maybe it’s just what Hannibal does to him.

His sense of time is gone, so it might be five minutes or hours that he lies near-motionless and yearning, burning up from the inside and unable to do anything about it, until Hannibal almost casually shifts his hand from Will’s hip to touch him properly.  A single stroke, more exploratory than anything else, but Will’s been waiting for it what feels like forever and he gulps a ragged breath before forcing himself to find words: “Again, I need--”

Hannibal’s fangs coming out of Will’s leg hurt almost as much as they did going in, and whether his gasp is due to that or Hannibal’s second stroke of his aching flesh is anyone’s guess.  Will’s grip on the difference between pain and pleasure has never been particularly good, and Hannibal seems to be determined to erase the distinction altogether.  At this particular moment Will’s inclined to let him.

He focuses on remembering to breathe while Hannibal laps at the mark he’s left, rests a hand on it casually to provide some pressure to stop any remaining bleeding, and then wipes the back of his other hand across his lips.  The hand comes away red and Will’s stomach does hot, squirmy somersaults - and then does them again when Hannibal absentmindedly licks the blood smear off again, like he can’t bear to waste any of Will.  Like Will is something precious.

Hannibal stretches up, long and fluid, to kiss Will slow and deep and hot.  His mouth is entirely warmed now by Will’s skin, Will’s blood, and he even looks warmer and healthier.  Will never thinks of Hannibal as looking particularly  _ un- _ alive on a normal day, but the contrast is clear when he’s freshly fed.  He looks ready to run a marathon and perhaps bench-press a small elephant afterwards.  Will can hardly move or think, except to feel proud and pleased that  _ he _ did this, gave this to Hannibal.

Before he can try to slap together enough brain cells to ask again for Hannibal to touch him, his odd, impossible lover draws back to a lighter, shorter kiss and then sits up to take in the entirety of Will.  Will can only imagine the picture he paints - pale and dizzy, red-streaked and half-helpless - as Hannibal starts to stroke him again, more firmly now, eyes roaming over all of Will that he can see.

“Lovely boy,” he says with a dazzling, slightly crimson smile, “I wish you could experience yourself as I do.  You have no idea how delicious you are.  I’d live on you, if I could.”

Will doesn’t entirely mean to say “I’d let you” out loud, but he’s not really in full possession of his faculties at the moment. And anyway it’s not exactly a secret that he loves this, given that his hips are starting to buck upward under Hannibal’s hand almost of their own volition, in rhythm with his strokes for now but struggling to stay that way.

“I know you would,” Hannibal says soothingly, his other hand stroking over Will’s latest bite wound in a way that both soothes and stings, confusing Will’s responses even further.  “Or at least you think you would, right now.  Someday, I’m going to fuck you when you’re like this, I think.”

Will can imagine that all too clearly: how pliant and willing he’d be, how he wouldn’t be able to manage to ride Hannibal the way he prefers, but would just have to lie there and be maddeningly, thoroughly fucked with all of the fiendish energy Hannibal would have just siphoned out of him.  Oh,  _ god _ .

Part of him wants that right now, but the rest of him writhes and arches and comes hard with Hannibal’s next downstroke.  Hannibal stretches up again, lightning-fast, and kisses Will through it, swallowing his sounds and his breath.  What’s left of Will unravels until he thinks he might be dust, a swarm of fireflies, dandelion seeds dispersing in the wind - something scattered and ephemeral and impossible to pull back together into any kind of coherent whole.

He thinks he might be gone, that Hannibal might have pushed too far and used him up entirely.  It’s an oddly peaceful thought, that he might just be - done.  Unmade by too much sensation, never again to have to care about anything outside of this room.

Somewhere, at a distant remove, Will’s aware that his racing heartbeat is slowing from its gallop.  Somewhere, someone’s breathing is growing steadier, and since Hannibal doesn’t breathe, it’s probably Will.  Thank god his body seems to know what to do without him, because Will’s not, quite, at home in his own head at the moment.   _ Gone Fishing _ , he thinks, and would laugh but laughter isn’t one of the things his body seems to have remembered yet.

Hannibal doesn’t jar him from his floating semi-conscious state by trying to make him move or talk right away.  Will’s vaguely aware that Hannibal’s checking and cleaning his new bitemarks ( _ putting the leftovers away for another day _ , he thinks vaguely).  He’s not together enough to notice when Hannibal leaves, but he does jar awake when Hannibal comes back with a glass and a plate that he sets on the nightstand by Will’s side of the bed.

The bed dips again and Will is gathered in arms that are still warm with borrowed vitality.  Hannibal bites at Will’s earlobe gently, not leaving a single mark, because Hannibal’s one of the only people Will knows who’s almost as many different and contradictory things as Will himself. When he has Will’s attention he says, “Say something so I know you’re still in there, please.”

Will consults his body to see if it remembers how to say things now.  “Present,” he finds himself mumbling.  “Sort of.  Higher functions not entirely online yet.”

“You don’t need higher functions for the rest of the evening.”  Hannibal sounds pleased with himself; Will’s suspected before that he enjoys reducing Will to a puddle just a little bit too much.  “Rest for a while.  When you wake up properly, there’s a snack there for you.  You should eat, when you feel up to it.”

Will considers eating, briefly, but his stomach rebels. A while longer before he’ll be up for that, then.  Good. He can stay where he is, held against Hannibal’s silent heart.  

“Later,” he says, starting to drift again.  Because it suddenly seems important to ask, he forces himself away from the drift long enough to add, “Do you feed anyone else you drink from?”

The silence is so profound and long that he thinks maybe he drifted asleep again and missed Hannibal’s response altogether.  But finally it comes, in an odd tone: “No.  There are people I feed and people I feed from.  You’re the only one who’s been both in a very long time.”

A  _ very long time _ means something, coming from a vampire.  Will tries to wrap his fuzzy head around that.  “That seems...should we talk about that?”

“Eventually.”  Hannibal’s voice warms back into its normal self, and he strokes Will’s hair to resettle him more closely.  “ _ Before _ dinner sometime.  I don’t think you’d remember if we talked about it now.”

Will grumbles: “I’ll remember.”  He tells himself to remember - that he’s unique in Hannibal’s world, that Hannibal must have been terribly lonely, that there’s a conversation to be had.

“Sleep, beloved,” Hannibal’s voice croons in his ear.

Will thinks:  _ remember that, for sure. _  He thinks:  _ Has he called me that before?  Do I forget every time?   _

And then he’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Congratulations (or: I'm so sorry) you have just read the only fic ‘verse (probably) in which I will ever let Hannibal call Will his “boy.” Which I generally avoid as it’s just super-not-my-thing despite being basically canon, but c’mon, if there was ever a time Hannibal could consider Will his “boy” it would be when there’s like a 200-year age difference. (-ish. I haven’t decided just how old Vamp!Hannibal is here.)
> 
> In other news, I am a) rather nervous about this one for a variety of reasons b) So sorry about the title, but I started writing this just as the Hugo Award nominations came out and it was just supposed to be a joke work-in-progress title but it stuck and now I can't come up with one I like better and also c) Interested, despite myself, in what’s outside the bounds of this prompt. I kinda want to know how Vamp!Hannibae and Human!Will got together, and whether this is a ‘verse where vampires are secret or whether perhaps they are known quantities and Jack is really pleased to have a vampire on his agent team and really annoyed when his agent and his empath get together, and just how much Will knows about how Hannibal disposes of his victims’ remains, and what Will’s dogs think of vampires, and how many times they’ve had this conversation with Will too fuzzy-headed to remember it, and whether Will would want to be turned, and many other things. If someone else also wants to know these things (or other things about this ‘verse), you should probably let me know so I'll have an excuse to revisit it.
> 
> As always, you can come talk to me / yell at me / prompt me / serenade me [over on Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com).


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